The acting carries the day in director Adrian Noble's new "As You Like It," at The Old Globe. His is a wintry, visually inconsistent production of Shakespeare's philosophical comedy; its strong undercurrents of violence and sorrow are only partially transformed by the love of Rosalind and Orlando and three other couples at the end.

Yet Rosalind centers "As You Like It," and vivacious actor Dana Green fills the role of Shakespeare's smartest, most spontaneous heroine with her mellifluous voice, commanding presence, and robust beauty. Green charms in the early scenes when her beloved father Duke Senior is exiled and she falls in love at first sight with Orlando, before he, too, is banished.

Dan Amboyer makes an instantly likable Orlando, a young man who wears his heart on his sleeve, whether falling in love with Rosalind or in sudden enmity for his cruel older brother, Oliver. Amboyer creates an Orlando whose innocence seems neither naive nor doltish, but rather an overflowing of natural nobility and youthful high spirits.

Disguised as the boy Ganymede, Green's Rosalind schools the smitten Orlando in scenes that share her delight in play-acting the man's role while seriously testing the fidelity of her potential husband. Green was mostly delightful here, though some of her wittily complex speeches felt rushed. This Rosalind's marriage, though, when it finally comes, does feel made in heaven.

Summer Shakespeare Festival artistic director Noble, however, opens his staging with a Holocaust image: Those exiled from the usurping Duke Frederick's court, including Rosalind's father, are forced into a cattle car, the train's ominous whistle suggesting transport to a concentration camp. The image is tonally off-key, for when Duke Senior, his banished men and eventually Rosalind and her cousin Celia leave the corrupt court, they land in a golden world, the Forest of Arden, not Auschwitz.

Other early scenes do occur in a Hitler-era 1930s environment, the women in slinky black, silver or gold evening dresses (gorgeous designs by costumer Deirdre Clancy), the men in tuxes. The entertainment for these aristocrats in a ballroom is an especially well-staged wrestling match between Orlando and Duke Frederick's man, Charles.

The fight choreography by Steve Rankin, the rising, roped ring by designer Ralph Funicello, and the acting before, during and after the match by Amboyer as Orlando, Jay Whittaker as nasty Oliver, Green as Rosalind, Vivia Font as Celia, and Matthew Bellows as the wrestler Charles make this sequence a high point of the production ---- a delicious treat visually and dramatically.

The Arden scenes have an especially effective "melancholy Jaques" in the aptly named Jacques C. Smith. He brings an impish delight as well as a philosophical temperament to his portrayal, and proves a mesmerizing storyteller as he evokes the seven ages of man in the character's most famous speech.

Actor Bob Pescovitz projects moral strength, a democratic instinct and open-hearted generosity as Duke Senior, making him a perfect ruler and father-in-law for Orlando when the time comes.

There's some wonderfully apt dancing and singing in the production, most of the latter led by Amiens, played by Adam Daveline, who sings beautifully and plays a mandolin. Shaun Davey composed the fine tunes to Shakespeare's lyrics. But the recorded, sometimes bombastic instrumental accompaniment feels synthetic, given the aliveness of the acting and the subtly mottled Old Master lighting by Alan Burrett.

The lighting and Noble's keen eye create some wonderful stage pictures in the forest ---- Orlando carrying old Adam (ever-reliable Charles Janasz) through Balboa Park's eucalyptus grove to the table; Orlando and Rosalind in her boy's disguise reclining on Celia; a kind of Maypole dance to "With a hey, and a ho, with a hey-nonny-no."

In the nimble Joseph Marcell, the production has a clown actor who avoids the usual trap of tediousness in the role of Touchstone, even if his match to the supremely vulgar Audrey of Danielle O' Farrell made as little sense as the love of Silvius (Christopher Salazar) for the over-the-top Phoebe (Allison Spratt Pearce).

"As You Like" is the most complex of Shakespeare's festive comedies, and the Globe has done well by it, with Stephen Wadsworth's radiant and profound staging with Francesca Faridany in 1998, Karen Carpenter's glittering, gorgeously costumed Victorian-era production with Katie MacNichol in 2004, and now Noble's somber, mostly effective 20th-century setting as the second entry in the 2012 festival.